Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

August 06, 2009

The people in this picture are not dissidents. They are civil rights lawyers who have been trying to work within the bounds of China's legal system and constitution to help ordinary Chinese people who are neither rich nor powerful nor politically connected. They have not been trying to organize an overthrow of the regime. Yes they're liberals in the Chinese political context - similar to how the ACLU and the EFF are liberal within the American context. Their rough equivalents in American political culture would be NPR-listening liberal democrats who work in public interest law with a lot of pro-bono cases and class-action lawsuits.

More than a week ago, Xu Zhiyong, the second man from the right in the picture above, was taken by police from his home. Police have not formally charged him with any crime, but his family learned from officials at the university where he teaches that he's being held for tax evasion. Xu is an elected member of the Beijing People's Congress and a civil rights lawyer who co-founded the Gongmeng legal aid organization. Xu has given defended and advised petitioners fighting official land-grabs in the provinces; he worked to expose the illegal "black jails" where some petitioners have been held. Gongmeng lawyers defended parents of children sickened by melamine-tainted milk powder last year, and worked on sensitive death penalty cases. Gongmeng was shut down by authorities in mid-July because they said the organization's Open Constitution Initiative had failed to pay taxes. Xu was detained along with another Gongmeng staffer, Zhuang Lu, the day before he was scheduled to attend a hearing on the matter. Nobody believes this matter is really about taxes: while it's possible that Gongmeng's books weren't in perfect order, pure tax infractions are generally not handled this way. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that tax technicalities were used as a cover to nab people for legal activities that powerful people find threatening.

When I saw Xu in Beijing earlier this year, he told me he said that Gongmeng was operating well within the bounds of Chinese law, dedicated to the improvement and hence longevity of the current regime. Nothing they were doing, he insisted, challenged Communist Party rule in any way. He claimed to be confident that Gongmeng would not have serious political trouble for this reason. Enough mainstream establishment people in Beijing seemed to agree with this view that he was even featured on the cover of the Chinese version of Esquire Magazine this month. (See picture on left.) Magazines like that - always concerned about potential trouble with the publishing authorities - generally won't touch people whose reputations their editors believe might endanger their publishing license. Sharon Hom of Human Rights in China warns: “By suppressing Xu Zhiyong, who is a moderate voice for social change and has dedicated his career to helping forge a society with genuine rule of law, the authorities are running the risk of radicalizing the forces for reform and change in China.”

But the crackdown is broad and deep, and shows no sign of ending. In May, 20 civil rights lawyers who had defended Tibetans, Falun Gong members, and other politically sensitive clients were effectively disbarred. In July the licenses of another 53 lawyers were revoked. On the same day as Xu's detention, security officials raided the office of Yi Ren Ping, a non-governmental organization dedicated to fighting discrimination, and confiscated all copies of its latest newsletter on grounds that they don't have a publishing license. A number of people involved with a citizens' effort to collect information about children who died in the Sichuan earthquake and raise questions about shoddy construction of schools have been arrested. Earthquate survivor He Hongchun was convicted for disturbing social order. Huang Qi, who reported online about the plight of children who died in the quate, went on trial this week for disclosing state secrets; the court's ruling has yet to be announced. According to Human Rights in China a key witness was kidnapped and prevented from appearing in court to testify for Huang's defence. Tan Zuoren, an activist who conducted an investigation into the reasons why so many school buildings collapsed in the quake, is scheduled to go on trial for state subversion next week.

While many news reports about all of these developments point to the upcoming 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic as a possible reason for the crackdown, experts in Chinese law are worried that this is not just a temporary phase - and that something much more serious and long-lasting could be happening. Jerome Cohen, one of the preeminent experts on the PRC's legal system, wrote yesterday in an e-mail (which I quote with his permission): "What we are witnessing now is a systematic campaign unparalleled since the beginning of the Open Policy in 1978. It has nothing to do with the 60th celebration. Are there still people who believe that such policies and practices can be explained because of the approach of one or another of China's many anniversaries?"

Rather, Cohen and some other legal experts are concerned that a much more deep-seated reversal is underway: it may be that the Chinese government intends to discourage the use of courts and China's legal system by the nation's many aggrieved citizens - steering them to other avenues for appeal and dispute-resolution. If this is the case, it represents a reversal of the government's repeatedly stated goal of "strengthening rule of law" that has been an emphasis over the past three decades, and on which China's civil rights lawyers and activists have staked their right to exist.

For every detention, arrest, and suspension, dozens of other people are being subject to questioning, their computer hard drives copied for detailed examination, and their personal notebooks and documents scanned for police records. I've heard informally from a few people who were either "invited for tea" by the police or who know people who were. From time to time somebody describes their "tea drinking" experience on their blog or on Twitter. Internet censorship has been getting increasingly worse all year: not just blocking of websites and social networking services hosted overseas, but the shutting down of people's blogs on domestic blogging platforms and the wholesale outages of some Chinese SNS's like Fanfou. Green Dam may have been defeated for now, but universities and other institutions are under growing pressure to install systems with the same kind of censorship and surveillance functionality. A clear message is also being sent that people will face serious consequences for posting sensitive information: the Fujian-based blogger and twitter user Guo Baofeng (aka @amoiist on Twitter) was detained along with several other bloggers for posting information of an alleged gang-rape and murder committed by an allegedly politically well-connected man.

Bloggers from all over China - and the Chinese speaking world - rallied to free Guo with a postcard-writing campaign, and fundraising drive to cover his family's legal expenses. He was recently released. Now the same kind of nation-wide effort is underway to support Xu Zhiyong. Liberal Chinese intellectuals around the country are also rallying to their defense with eloquent essays. But writing in places that the domestic audience has easy access to isn't easy. Gongmeng's blog on QQ was shut down. Guangzhou-based columnist Xiao Shu has seen his posts related to Xu Zhiyong and Gongmeng removed by administrators of his Netease blog. Here is one such post that I saved in my aggregator and posted into Google docs for safekeeping. Meanwhile, though, people keep trying. A petition campaign is underway. With Gongmeng's blog and website shut down, staff continue to post updates about their situation on their Twitter account. They are conducing a fund-raising drive to help with legal fees. They continue to fight for their rights as guaranteed - in theory - by the Chinese constitution and body of laws.

But if rule-of-law for civil rights really is being reversed as Cohen and others fear, that doesn't bode well for liberals with lingering hopes that their fortunes will improve after the October 1st anniversary has passed. We can expect that China's liberal intellectuals and liberal bloggers will keep pushing for their rights to the maximum extent possible. One of many problems however is that the pool of lawyers they can turn to when they get in trouble is getting smaller and smaller. In which case - will that force China's liberals to get increasingly fed up, and become more radical, as Sharon Hom of HRIC suggests? Or will they get worn down, censored and marginalized, successfully discredited by the propaganda machine, their efforts unknown or misunderstood by the vast majority of the Chinese public?

February 19, 2009

Liu writes today that he is being forced by the Haidian District Justice Bureau to shut down his law firm for six months. This means, he says, that he and all of the lawyers who work at his firm are "unemployed for six months."

As Global Voices Advocacy explains, the official reason for disciplinary action against his Yi Tong Law Firm is that the firm employed a lawyer who does not have a license to practice law. As Liu explains, Li Subin, the employee in question, was working as a legal assistant, not as a full lawyer. Li had his license suspended after accusing the Henan Justice Bureau of charging excessive lawyer registration fees back in 2001.

The real reason for the punishment, Liu believes, is that lawyers in his firm had petitioned last year for direct elections of the leadership of the Beijing Lawyers Association. He says the goal is to drive his lawyers to flee to other firms and cause the Yi Tong law firm to fail. He points out that this is the same tactic used against civil rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng. This is non-trivial, given that Gao went on to be tortured, spoke out about it, and has now disappeared.

Liu is a prolific blogger and defense lawyer who writes passionately about the cases he is involved with and other cases he follows. He has not shied away from controversy in the past couple of years. Perhaps most controversially, he represented family members of Yang Jia, the confessed cop killer, arguing on his blog that while the defendant may have been guilty he was not afforded due process under Chinese law. He called attention to various shenanigans pulled by the prosecution around the time of the trial, such as the illegal detention of Yang Jia's mother in a mental institution. Public sympathy for Yang Jia was widespread - discussion of the case around the Chinese Internet was arguably more widespread than, say, Charter 08 and also potentially much more threatening to the regime in the immediate term.

Liu's office is a dusty low-rent affair in a rabbit-warren of offices inside a hotel, inside a shopping center across from Beijing's West Train Station. Liu is the classic pulblic-defender type who you can find in many countries: dogged, determined, believing fervently in everybody's right to legal defense and a their day in court. China has a constitution and a legal system and he takes them both seriously - along with the rights that they are supposed to grant China's citizens. He defends people accused of all kinds of crimes who don't have connections or resources to hire fancy lawyers. He says a foreign journalist recently asked him why, as a Communist Party member, he was defending people accused of theft or murder. He says there is no conflict: after all he is serving the people, isn't he?

Liu is obsessed with the law, with justice, with the legal process. He is so obsessed, in fact, that he writes about these topics on over a dozen blog-hosting services - and says he posts to about six of his blogs nearly every day. All of his blogs, he says, have censored his postings at various times. But they all censor his writings differently...

Liu supporters in the blogosphere are pretty darn unhappy about the latest effort to "harmonize" him not just virtually, but in the "real" world. Ai Weiwei writes:

What kind of person is afraid of this kind of man? Only those people who inhabit the dark corners of the legal system, who don't want to see the common folk win, those people who are aided by evil forces, those people who want China to forever belong to a small minority, people to whom you cannot speak reason.

Speaking out for Liu Xiaoyuan is speaking out for everybody. When we have justice we won't need others to speak out for us. We must protect those who seek justice just as our great nation cherishes CCTV, or otherwise there won't be anybody left to speak up for you.

Brother Xie Yong has said of the post 1949 regime: "Whoever is right should be ignored." We can imitate his words to say of today's regime: "Whoever doesn't obey is dealt with." That is the picture of the conditions Chinese people are living under today.

A blogger called dafengqixi points to Liu's situation as part of a long list of reasons why the regime is bankrupt, starting his post by saying:

Mark Twain once wrote that some people in the U.S. congress were raised by whores. Well he didn't know that some Chinese officials raise whores, while others are raised by whores...

Yahoo acknowledged releasing personal user information about the
writers to the Chinese government, but said it had to comply with the
country's lawful request and therefore cannot be held liable. Its
40-page response was filed yesterday in U.S. District Court for Northern California.

I just got hold of the original documents that Yahoo! filed. Four PDF's:

August 06, 2007

Blogger "Yetaai" had his day in court on Friday. He is suing China Telecom for blocking his website promoting a piece of open source financial accounting software. He has written an English account as well as a Chinese account of the trial. John Kennedy has also posted a translation on Global Voices.

Chinese Internet users have found various ways to protest the "Great Firewall of China," but this appears to be the first attempt to use the courts to force ISP's to admit that censorship is happening. Since Yetaai's website had no political content on it, the blockage of his website was likely a result of what is called "over-blocking." He is suing for restoration of access to his site or for anacceptable explanation for the block - beyond the explanation of "irreversible reasons," that he received when he first complained to customer service. He is also demanding compensation for notary fees and refund of broadband fees, given that the broadband service provided was unacceptable.

Writing in English about his lawsuit back in early May, Yetaai wrote this about its larger meaning:

Can we improve the Chinese Constitution to contain a statement that the government should protect the human right to know the truth or approaches to the truth?

If censorship is unavoidable, how it can be monitored and made transparent? With monitoring and transparency, errors can be corrected. Certainly, China Telecom should have an official (and helpful) answer. With one, I could learn why I am blocked and to whom I can ask in order to recover access from China to my website.

In June, Yetaai posted more details on the case along with a scan of the notarized documents he submitted as part of his lawsuit. This page shows a screenshot of the China Telecom advertising page that appeared when he attempted to visit his website on his broadband connection without using a proxy server. This page shows his website, realcix.com, as it appeared when visited via proxy server. This page shows the traceroute he performed, although unfortunately it's too small to read, but he says that the traceroute "demonstrates that the router is inside China Telecom." The notarized description of what happened is here and here. He also added links to these scanned pages to his original English post about the case.

Based on his description of Friday'sproceedings, it appears that China Telecom seeks to win on technical grounds, casting doubt on Yetaai's evidence and challenging the legitimacy of the notary process he used. If they succeed with that line of argument, assuming that the case proceeds in a logical manner, then they won't need to resort to the next line of defense: that the censorship was either not their responsibility or beyond their control. If they have to make either of those arguments then, as one commenter points out, "if you force [them] to admit the GFW ["great firewall"] exists, you will have won, making it easier for the masses to push it over."

Which is of course why Yetaai's lawyer is not optimistic about winning the case.

If you read Chinese and want a good laugh read this comment. It concludes: "Some say that China ranks third in the world at blocking IP addresses. Why are we only third? We should be number one. Long live the GFW."

February 15, 2005

Ed Cone reports that a clueless Tulsa newspaper is suing a blogger not only for "reproducing" parts of its articles... but also for linking to it without permission! The Blogger, Michael Bates, writes:

"I believe I have respected the World's copyrights
within the fair-use exemption. Let the World name the specific articles
in which it alleges that I have exceeded fair use. I have violated no
law by directing readers to the Tulsa World's own website to read the
Tulsa World's own content as the World itself presents it."

Bates' blog post includes the full letter from the clueless Tulsa World's Vice President, John R. Bair. What in the world is this guy thinking? Is he clueless? Bates is appealing to the blogosphere for help:

This is the old media trying to intimidate their critics in the new
media into silence. It has repercussions for any blogger engaged in
media criticism. It strikes at the heart of what blogs do. I'd
appreciate your help in putting the blogosphere's spotlight of shame on
this legal threat.